Beethoven: darkness and return to light, piano sonata 31/3 — a metaphor in sound for transitions from illness to health.

A school of liberty is being born in Iran, a school that will endure for generations, capitalized by the blood of tens of thousands dreaming of freedom. Almost fifty years of deeply suppressive fanatical regime has exerted pressure creating a people wise in the ways of tyranny.

The school exists in two places: in the large Iranian diaspora, and inside Iran, hidden among the colonized, waiting.

“Iran Revolution Live” with Iranian hosts Goldie and Armin: Day 85

The program begins with proof that the revolution has powerful music and poetry.

Reza Pahlavi on what Iran will be like after the revolution, at 25:00 minutes into the Goldie/Armin program of 22 March 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=62RySJ3yrkM&t=1511s

A poem of liberty at 39:20

At 59:26 within her own program Goldie runs an entire program by Mahyar Tousi, of Tousi.tv, asking her viewers to watch and return to her programming when Tousi is finished.

“If Change Comes to Iran, Will Freedom Be Ready?” Mohamad Machine-Chian with Tom G. Palmer.of Atlas Network ••• [youtube] first presented live on March 8, 2026

“Fighting for Freedom: Hope, Iran, and the Power of Civil Society with Mohamad Machine-Chian” ••• The Atlas Society •••

Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle: “Reformer in exile: Scholar says Iranian people reject regime’s ideology and terror tactics: Mohamad Machine-Chian, now a researcher at Pitt, describes the disconnect between the Iranian people and the regime that governs them.” ••• by Toby Tabachnick ••• June 30, 2025

The National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI)

“The National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization in Washington, DC. It works to elevate the voices of the Iranian- American community, which tirelessly strives to strengthen international support for the Iranian people’s democratic aspirations and to help shape a serious policy framework for a peaceful transition and long-term stability.”

“The Iran Prosperity Project presents this Booklet as a blueprint for the first 180 days following the fall of the Islamic Republic (the “Emergency Phase”), serving as a practical guide to Iran’s transition to freedom and stability.” — fund.nufdiran.org/en

“What will a free Iran be like?”

Reza Pahlavi on what Iran will be like after the revolution, at 25:00 minutes into the Goldie/Armin program of 22 March 2026: youtube.com/watch?v=62RySJ3yrkM&t=1511s

What a Free Iran will mean to the World ••• Farzad ••• 3/12/26

As if Iran were Galt’s Gulch, and Farzad is telling us what it will be like when the Iranian people can return to the world after centuries of colonization. -ls

Irshad Manji is founder and director of the Moral Courage Project •••

Cody Carbone ••• CEO of The Digital Chamber ••• interviewed ••• by Paul Barron •••

“As lawmakers work to unify crypto and traditional finance under one rulebook, U.S. banks are pressing Congress to ban yields on payment stablecoins.”

“March 11, 2026 WASHINGTON — The Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] and Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] today announced that they have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to guide coordination and collaboration between the two agencies to support lawful innovation, uphold market integrity, and ensure investor and customer protection.” — cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/9192-26

Were Judge Narragansett, Hugh Akston, and Midas Mulligan consulted before this was drafted?

Hugh Alston: The world-renowned former head of the Department of Philosophy at Patrick Henry University in Cleveland, Dr. Akston taught John Galt, Francisco d'Anconia, and Ragnar Danneskjöld. He is later persuaded by his former students to join their strike, and takes a lowly job flipping hamburgers in a roadside diner in Wyoming. On the trail of "the destroyer," Dagny discovers Akston there—and his answers to her questions reveal that he too is one of the strikers.

Judge Narragansett: An eminent legal scholar and Illinois Superior Court justice, Judge Narragansett goes on strike after his decision against Hunsacker is overturned by a higher court. He becomes the arbiter of disputes in Galt's Gulch.

Midas Mulligan: Brash, colorful owner of the Mulligan Bank of Chicago, early investor in Rearden Steel, and the world's richest man. Midas Mulligan goes on strike and vanishes when a court orders him to make a risky loan to Lee Hunsacker to take over the Twentieth Century Motor Company. Mulligan then buys a remote valley in the Colorado Rockies that he secretly develops as "Gult's Gulch."

The biographies are taken from “Atlas Shrugged — Cast of Characters” by The Atlas Society •••

Nick Regan: “The CLARITY Act is Coming: Don’t Get Shaken Out by the Volatility!” — youtube.com/watch?v=ZKey4xhux_A — SEC & CFTC

‘The wait is over as the Clarity Act late April markup officially redefines digital assets and your financial freedom. This isn't just another bill; it’s a historic White House mandated truce solving the trillion dollar yield war. We're breaking down how Section 404 and activity based rewards are shifting the US crypto market toward a crypto capital vision under new SEC chair Paul Atkins.’

Vitaliy Katsenelson’s “The Intellectual Investor” — https://investor.fm/

Amazon’s description of the book: “FIREFLIES were proverbs, aphorisms and maxims originated in China and Japan and were often written on pieces of silk. Tagore visited Japan and collected them in his notebooks. Each firefly, rarely more than a sentence long, represents a luminous thought on love, life, beauty or God. Each page of this book contains a decorative design by Boris Artzybasheff with the short maxim of Tagore's beneath. The text also includes Tagore's Nobel Acceptance Speech.”

Tagore’s speech: rajeshcmehta.blogspot.com/2012/11/rabindranath-tagores-nobel-prize.html

The town of Santiniketan

‘The town of Santiniketan was founded by Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, the father of Rabindranath Tagore, who was a Bengali philosopher, polymath, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Maharshi Devendranath Tagore was a follower of the Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that emphasized the worship of one supreme God and the importance of education and social reform.’ — santiniketan.com/culture/history-of-santiniketan/

“Foresight Institute’s Existential Hope Meme Prize wants memes to inspire optimism about AI and the future.” ••• by the San Francisco Standard

Advisors to the Foresight project: futurist Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, cofounder of The Long Now Foundation, Lawrence Lessig, cofounder of Creative Commons, and Peter Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE.

Stephen Blackwood, founder of Ralston College ••• wrote (excerpt from a web post):

‘We are living in a historic moment: not just a swing of the proverbial pendulum or electoral cycle, but a much deeper and wider and more fundamental shift. We see it in the tumult of our politics and in the intense frustration with our institutions. We see it in the brutality of coercion and cancellation, in deepening civic alienation, and in the volatility that seems to underlie nearly everything.

But most of all we see it in the refusal to accept that this is all there is. We see that refusal in the widespread crisis of meaning and in the demand for better answers to real questions. We see it in the longing for deeper self-knowledge, and in the stubbornly unquenchable desire to realize what is highest and best in us all.

We are living in a tumultuous and uncertain time, but also one of great potential and possibility. The question is: what will we do?

In higher education, we are clearly facing demand for revolutionary reform. From new technologies to brand new institutions, the opportunity to reimagine education is vast.

The status quo in higher education has prevailed for far too long and has commanded far too great a psychological hold on far too many and at incalculable cost. One of Ralston College’s primary objectives from the beginning was to make the argument—and to give others the confidence—to build new and different things.’

Michael Strong’s The Socratic Experience: The education we wish we had had: classical education with self-directed learning

Michael’s school might help your child find purpose, as illustrated above. -ls

St. John’s College — https://www.sjc.edu/

‘St. John’s is a community of 1,000 students engaged in the rigorous exploration of great books and enduring ideas. Across philosophy, literature, the sciences, and more, students and faculty learn together by reading real books, asking deep questions, and pursuing truth for its own sake. St. John’s offers an education that is both timeless and timely. Instead of hiding behind screens and lectures, students engage with the books and each other to uncover a shared humanity and an intellectual fearlessness—qualities that serve them in college, life, and career.’

Jeffrey Tucker’s Spirits of America — a review ••• from The Asylum: Satire and Commentary for Discerning Citizens ••• posted August 28, 2025 by The Inmate

‘Jeffrey Tucker’s Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial (the 250th anniversary of the United States) reminds the reader of the great American traits we’ve been losing for many decades.’

The Asylum quotes John Taylor Gato: ‘Only a few lifetimes ago, things were very different in the United States. Originality and variety were common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social-class boundaries were relatively easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do much for themselves independently, and to think for themselves. We were something special, we Americans, all by ourselves, without the government sticking its nose into and measuring every aspect of our lives’

Events Hosted at Polyface Farm ••• (where spirts of America flourish)

“The Need for Definite Images of Good: the problem with dark-adapted eyes” , by Mary McDermott Shideler

Dvorak: Symphony 9, The New World; String Quartet 12, American

Many performances on YouTube (Premium subscription suppresses ads)

Polyface Farm — Joel Salatin, “the lunatic farmer” •••

‘Joel Salatin, 68, calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate.’ — thelunaticfarmer.com/about

‘Let’s face it. Farming isn’t easy, and turning it into a thriving, full-time business often feels like an impossible dream.

Origins Reclaimed ••• writes about Joel Salatin •••

The work of A Midwestern Doctor ••• on the healing properties of DMSO

“DMSO, AI, and The Great Transformation of Information” •••

“For this month’s open thread, I wanted to talk about a topic that’s becoming an increasingly important part of our lives—artificial intelligence —given how much I’ve interacted with it over the last six months while researching DMSO.” -AMD

AMD’s research is amazing for reach and depth. -ls

In an earlier article, “The Great Vanishing of Information” ••• AMD wrote: ‘I realized that even though the internet was getting “bigger” each year, it was actually getting much harder to find the information I was looking for and the overall quality of information now is so much worse. This is to the point that I do not think it would be possible for me to know a lot of what I know if I had not used the internet from its infancy in the 1990s (or to know how to find what I’m looking for now and how to sort fact from fiction online).’

This is perhaps why we will want research teams of ai agents with genetics known and worthy of trust. Soon, it will become easy for anyone to assemble such a team. (see hol.org & hol.org/blog/). The path that will serve us well will be unbounded competition among truth finders, protected by whatever portion of the population that achieves and retains epistemological integrity. -ls

Anyone concerned with cancer might look at these:

Cancer Care, by Dr. Paul Marik ••• cv •••

Leading Edge Clinic ••• Dr. Pierre Kory, bio •••

And watch these four videos on repurposed inexpensive drugs:

Dr. John Campbell •••

Dr. John Campbell ••• interviews Dr. William Makis

Dr. Paul Marik •••

‘… this obsession with randomized double-blind studies has to stop.’ at 07:45

Dr. Liz O’Riordan ••• (strongly opposed to Campbell and Marik)

If the differences between these two positions are of interest, look at this discussion between Leif Smith (editor) and Perplexity.ai:

‘What claim have we to vaunt a superior civilization to Henry II’s times? We are sunk in a barbarism all the deeper because it is tolerated by moral lethargy and covered with a veneer of scientific conveniences.’ —Churchill, written in 1938 in A History of the English Speaking Peoples, chapter XII, “Henry Plantagenet”.

Konstantin Kisin: “We now have generations of politicians who have lived through times when reality was not real.” And after quoting Ayn Rand: ‘You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.’ ••• during an interview by Rafaela Siewert of The Free Press.

To an old man who said he was feeling ‘increasingly irrelevant’:

An old man who plants fruit trees in good soil can never be irrelevant.

Mike Rowe in conversation with Palmer Luckey, CEO of Anduril Industries

Palmer quotes C. S. Lewis, about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:

“Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the hobbits or the shire and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called. The terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which the hobbits forget against powers which the hobbits dare not imagine.” — “Tolkien on Homeland Defense” by Chris Mooney, of The American Prospect •••, 4 Dec, 2001

We are watching beasts whose days are ending battle for survival. At any time one of them, even unintentionally, may crush us. Each beast wishes to rule us in ways that harm us. Nevertheless, we have reasons to prefer one of them to the others, while, relentlessly, we will discover ways to make them irrelevant.

“Freeorder Bridge 0.95” blended with the style of Jenny Uglow, author of The Lunar Men, telling a story about Manchester, England in the 1830s. Blender: Perplexity.ai

Freeorder Bridge, seen from a little distance, is less an engineering plan than the slow, patient sketch of a civilization in which people are free to shape lives of adventure without being drafted into other people’s schemes. It traces how, over centuries, inquiry and enterprise have chipped away at dogma, so that limits discovered in logic, experiment, and economic loss can guide the emergence of social patterns no one can fully design yet all can help to improve. The name “freeorder” is offered to hold this intuition in a single word: the discovery that freedom, rightly limited, can give rise to more humane order than any blueprint enforced from above.

At the heart of the vision is a change in how people think about knowledge and society: away from collectivist abstractions and toward the felt purposes, judgments, and experiments of individual persons. Advances in the physical sciences, from Newton onward, and in the human sciences, through methodological subjectivism and the understanding of markets as discovery processes, become milestones in this shift. Together they suggest that conjecture, refutation, and the acceptance of error are not technical niceties but conditions for a flourishing common life.

From this follows a strategy that is intentionally modest in each step yet audacious in its accumulation. It calls for ventures that act as “freeorder generators,” places where people gather to listen at the edge of the possible, to sponsor experiments in living, thinking, and making that test new balances between designed and spontaneous orders. These ventures, in turn, are supported by “integrating forges,” groups of learner-investors who treat each commitment of capital as a hypothesis, expecting some failures, and using each one as a source of shared learning rather than shame.

Over time, many such forges, loosely linked, begin to form a pattern larger than any individual project can see. Portfolios come to resemble pointillist canvases: thousands of small, distinct strokes that only gradually reveal an emerging image of more generous and resilient ways of living. Artists and storytellers notice, and as they work with the material of these experiments, a quiet recognition spreads that something good is taking shape in the world—tentative, fallible, yet unmistakably hopeful.

The political and legal implications unfold just as slowly. As people grow used to relying on networks of ventures and forges, it becomes easier to imagine governments not as owners but as constrained providers—minimally armed competitors in the art of governance, bound by the same facts, feedback, and financial limits that discipline other institutions. In such a world, freeorder is not an end state but an ongoing “Emergence,” a season like spring, returning again and again, in which individuals across the earth learn to fashion, and refashion, subjectively rewarding adventures with cosmopolitan tolerance and a quietly distributed compassion.

pdf •••

“Freeorder Bridge 0.95” blended with the style of Rumi. Blender: Perplexity.ai

Freeorder is a way of walking through the world where every step is both gift and experiment, a dance between what is carefully shaped and what arises of itself.

There is a word for the nameless longing that refuses both tyranny of plans and chaos of impulse: freeorder, the marriage of freedom with form so that questing souls can move, err, and learn without being made tools of another’s dream.

Whenever hearts and households, ventures and cities, remember to ask, “What balance of design and spontaneity best serves living adventure here?” freeorder glimmers like dawn on the edge of thought.

Those who study society are invited to turn their gaze from faceless masses to the single breathing chooser, whose purposes, errors, and awakenings cannot be averaged away.

Joined with the hard humility of conjecture and refutation, this subjectivist seeing becomes a discipline of love: every theory of how people ought to live must kneel before what actually helps one real person to flourish in truth.

Scattered across the earth, forges appear as quiet hearths where wanderers bring questions, capital, craft, and courage, to light small experimental fires of practice.

Each forge is a lover of risk that does not gamble with lives but with hypotheses, placing many small bets so that failure becomes a teacher, not a tyrant.

Every investment, every attempt, is a colored dot on a vast unseen canvas, and as thousands of such dots gather, patterns whisper of what helps human beings live wide-awake, generous, and strong.

Artists, poets, and storytellers catch these patterns and turn them into tales, so that people feel, before they can explain, that something quiet and good is spreading through their own possibilities of life.

As freeorder matures, the old costume of the state as master frays; power remembers it is only a service, constrained by loss, by fact, by logic, and by the refusal of the living to be owned.

Governance becomes one craft among many, offered in competition, modestly armed, watched over by communities that have learned to rely more on evolving agreements than on decrees.

This work does not finish; it ripens, as independent forges enter cycle after cycle of learning, losing, adjusting, discovering, until the pattern of their persistence is known simply as the Emergence.

In that Emergence, ordinary men and women make of their days a subjectively rewarding adventure, walking with cosmopolitan tolerance and a distributed compassion, as if freeorder were spring itself, returning again and again after every winter of fear.

pdf •••

Can the Courts Delete Democracy? ••• [epoch times] by Jeffrey Tucker

‘Our forefathers had the idea of creating a government of, by, and for the people. The crucial tool to make this possible was the vote: the people would have their way, within law, and through their elected representatives. The idea was rooted in the ancient idea of democracy but with a republican twist—it would not be mob rule. There would be checks and balances. There would be inviolable rights.

Everyone on the planet Earth at the time said that this would never work—you need a king or a dictator or some other hereditary or ecclesiastical leader. It worked anyway. One hundred years later, the United States—its economy, culture, and freedoms—became the envy of the world.’

Thoughts on freeorder that in time will fit into something larger. The works referred to in the following are:

Michael Polanyi’s “The Republic of Science”

“The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” by Michael Polanyi

Claudio Véliz’ The New World of the Gothic Fox

The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America ••• by Claudio Véliz, University of California Press, 1994 —a superb book on the benefits of freeorder.

Also by Claudio Véliz: “Pope Francis and Peron’s Last Hurrah” ••• Quadrant Magazine, February 2016

James C. Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge

The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century, by James C. Bennett, 2004

Jim is now writing a book about entrepreneurial ventures focused beyond Earth, their beginning, history, and future. Read about and support this work by visiting this GoFundMe page: Commercial Space Launch History: The Unknown Story •••

The emulsification (breaking up) of forced single-source regulation

Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” and a comparable Republic of Capital

Part of freeordering is to replace one‑size‑fits‑all compulsory regulation with a marketplace of risk‑balancing services that help people and ventures stay within their own evolving risk envelopes instead of forcing them into a regime hypothetically fit for everyone.

Think of this as building a healthy financial immune system featuring many competing teams of humans and clouds of AI agents continuously testing narratives, contracts, and counterparties, while learning from error, and rewarding those whose judgment improves.

“Emulsification of compulsory regulatory services” names the gradual breaking up of monopoly, state‑run safety templates into diverse, voluntarily chosen assurance systems, so that our ways of handling risk can co‑evolve with reality, preserving both prudent protection and the freedom to pursue asymmetric upside, instead of being locked into a single brittle pattern—much as over‑standardized, mandated medical interventions can distort natural immune evolution when they are allowed to crowd out adaptive responses.

Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” is a vast, self‑organizing ecology of conjecture and refutation in which each scientist freely risks time and reputation on experiments that mostly fail, yet whose aggregate pattern of failures and partial successes yields what Popper and Polanyi call science.

The freeordering strategy is to extend that same pattern—many independent, fallible, corrigible experiments under a shared norm of truth‑seeking—into venture design, investment, gain seeking, and loss‑avoidance, so that over time we get a “Republic of Capital”: myriads of investors and builders, each testing their own theses about how to deploy the world’s accumulated productive resources, with no central authority freezing the pattern.

In such a republic, regulatory structures are part of the experiment space, not outside it: competing risk‑balancing services, covenant forms, on‑chain assurance tools, and governance designs live or die by how well they serve both prudence (loss reduction) and quest (asymmetric upside) across billions of individual risk envelopes, rather than being vitrified or fixed in place by decree.

As Polanyi’s “Republic of Science” emerges from countless, freely chosen conjectures and refutations by individual researchers, so a “Republic of Capital” must emerge from countless, freely chosen experiments in venture and investment by individual risk‑takers—and the emulsification of compulsory regulatory services is the process of breaking up monopoly rule‑books so that these experiments in risk‑balancing, loss‑avoidance, and asymmetric gain can evolve under shared norms rather than centralized command.

A metaphor based on Comparison of French and English gardens using Hayek’s Cosmos/Taxis distinction

French and English gardens make this distinction visible. The French formal garden (Versailles, Le Nôtre) is almost pure taxis: symmetry, central axes, clipped geometry, nature forced into an a priori design—beauty as command. The English landscape garden is closer to cosmos: artfully guided but asymmetrical, curved, using existing landforms, trees, and water; it “discovers” and frames emergent features instead of overwriting them.

In freeorder terms, the French garden is design overwhelming emergence; the English garden is design working with emergence to serve quest. Voltaire, in his “Letters About the English” realized something like this.

About the use of “cosmos” and “taxis” see chapter 2 of Hayek’s Law, Legislation and Liberty, “Cosmos and Taxis”.

Claudio Véliz’s “Baroque hedgehog” versus “Gothic fox” describes those garden styles.

The hedgehog (Realist, Baroque) believes in a single unifying pattern that should govern the whole; he is at home in Versailles, where one mind’s vision organizes an entire landscape.

The gothic fox (Nominalist) “is unerringly aware of the multiplicity of particular things” and suspicious of any system that claims to centrally control them, and so prefers the English habit of bounded, but not over‑designed, variety.

French garden culture thus expresses the hedgehog/baroque impulse in space: visible unity imposed from above. English garden culture expresses the fox/gothic impulse: constrained freedom, structured irregularity, a negotiated balance of taxis and cosmos rather than domination by taxis.

Bennett’s “Anglosphere” Thesis

Bennett’s Anglosphere thesis then looks like an attempt to build English gardens at civilizational scale.

Certain English‑speaking societies developed legal and cultural frameworks that intentionally (or accidentally) maintain quest‑enabling balances between designed orders (common law, contracts, technical standards) and spontaneous orders (markets, associations, common‑law evolution), rather than letting either Versailles‑style planning or pure unframed chaos dominate.

The distinctive contribution of the Anglosphere is that it is an uncommon and unnamed balance of cosmos and taxis, a fox‑like readiness to tolerate and learn from many partial orders, within customary and legal frameworks that prevent the worst collisions. When a name for such continual balance seeking and finding is needed, perhaps freeorder will serve, defined as: “quest‑serving balances among designed and spontaneous orders.”

Returning to the garden metaphor

Applied to agriculture and gardening, a “French garden” mentality aims at uniformity: monoculture, centralized standards, top‑down agronomy and regulation—efficient on its own terms, but brittle, suppressing local knowledge and adaptation.

An “English garden” mentality (at its best) is closer to freeorder: mixed crops, hedgerows, local soil and water practices, experiments by individual farmers and gardeners, linked by trade, custom, and evolving knowledge rather than a single master plan.

Freeordering in agriculture means using designed structures (property, contract, measurement, science) to frame and protect a vast, fox‑like diversity of local experiments in soil, seed, water, tools, and market arrangements, while resisting attempts—by states, global cartels, or technocratic movements—to turn the entire landscape into Versailles in the name of efficiency or safety.

All this helps to show that in gardens, farms, public ventures, and polities alike, we thrive not by abolishing either design or spontaneity, but by learning to balance and compose them—French and English styles together—in ways that continually meet the test of serving individual and shared quests.

Socrates’ Way: Seven Master Keys to Using Your Mind to the Utmost ••• by Ronald Gross, author of Peak Learning ••• [amazon] Bio ••• Founder/Director of Conversations New York ••• Co-chair of University Seminar on Innovation at Columbia University; email GrossAssoc@aol.com

Freeorder Bridge 0.95 blended with the style of J.R.R. Tolkien by Perplexity.ai

In an age when many grew weary and hearts were hemmed about by heavy walls of law and custom, there arose a quiet counsel among wanderers and wise folk, that a new ordering of the world must be sought—a freeorder, in which freedom and form walk side by side as comrades, and not as foes.

They spoke first of naming this thing rightly, for in all tongues it had gone half-seen and half-said: the fit mingling of what is designed with what arises unbidden, of craft and of chance, so that each person might follow a road of their own choosing, yet find along it good company, fair dealing, and ways to mend what is marred. Out of this naming there grew a lore that turned from the counting of masses and abstractions to the tale of single lives, of the choices of women and men, their learning, and the correction of their own errors, as a gardener tends each tree and does not speak only of the forest.

As seasons turned, minstrels, painters, and tellers of great tales began to weave these stirrings into song and story, until word went quietly from hearth to hearth that “some fair and unexpected good is afoot,” though few yet could name it. From their work there spread an intuition, deep as the memory of older ages, that the world herself was bending toward a more generous pattern, and that to live was not only to endure, but to adventure. Meanwhile, the high towers of rule and law were slowly taught humility: realms that had once grasped all power in mailed fists began to loosen their hold, giving up shards of sovereignty, and entering into open contest as mere stewards and keepers among many, bound by reason, by the proofs of deed and outcome, and by the stern accounting of loss and gain.

Then were founded certain houses of experiment, called forges, where folk of many lands gathered as both seekers and stewards, bearing small hoards of gold, time, and wit, to be ventured upon untried works. In these halls each new work was held to be but a guess—a bright conjecture set upon the anvil of the world—to be proved or broken, and, whether in triumph or in failure, to yield clear lessons to all who took part. Many such forges were bound together by living networks, like roads and rider-posts between distant cities, so that tidings of success and ruin, of folly and newfound wisdom, ran swiftly through the land and none were left to wander in ignorance alone.

So the long labor was set: to endure in many cycles of venture and learning, of sowing and reaping, through countless forges and far-flung circles of companions, until at last a deeper pattern—called by some the Emergence—should be plain to the eyes of even the most cautious. And in that time to come, if the work held true, people in many lands would wake to lives shaped not by command and fear, but by subjectively rewarding adventures: roads chosen freely, rich in peril and wonder, in which tolerance among strangers, a wide-scattered compassion, and ever-mending institutions would together uphold a freeorder that grows, shifts, and improves, as living things do, from age to age.

"Inklings of Another World" ••• by Mary McDermott Shideler — the significance of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

“10 Life Lessons I Passed On to My Daughter on Her Bat Mitzvah” ••• Vitaliy Katsenslson, 26 Feb 2026

Health and Disease — The Freeorder Strategy

We focus on health in all systems, biological, industrial, agricultural, financial, political, and on how they support individual quest (patterns of adventure).

Much bad exists in the world. We can spend all our lives studying its ways.

Knowing every detail about disease will not cure it. What will cure is understanding how biological systems repair themselves, how to stay out of their way, how to give them the resources they need. It is the same with non-biological systems.

In short, understanding health is more important then understanding disease.

Hernando de Soto, Prime Minister (appointee) for a day

“An interview with Hernando de Soto” ••• McKinsey & Company, 1 Oct 2012

Pat Wagner comments

Thomas L. Knapp ••• in concluding his comment, and referring to the four progressive presidents, points us to Mussolini’s elegant and comprehensive summary of fascism: ‘… they were all one form or another of Mussolini's "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”’

“The Logic of Social Action: Austrian Law-and-Economics” ••• Josef Šíma, Prague University of Economics

‘The collapse of communism clearly demonstrated that private property matters. This simple truth has often been denied though by economic theoreticians especially with the “success” of formalist revolution in economics in the second half of the 20th century. Coasean and Posnerian version of law-and-economics described in textbooks as the school of thought that brought property back into economics however does not offer much improvement. A growing number of authors has shown that Chicago efficiency theory of rights is contradictory. It is a goal of this paper to present a case for more fundamental defense of property in economics.’

‘… we may speak of the interconnection between Logic of Law and Logic of Choice, or in short of the Logic of (Social) Action. Its goal would be to develop necessary logical implications of the existence of scarcity for human society.’

India — Shruti Rajagopalan ••• at Mercatus Center, George Mason University

‘I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where I lead the Indian Political Economy Program and Emergent Ventures India grants program and The 1991 Project. I also host the Ideas of India podcast and write a substack on Indian political economy and culture called Get Down and Shruti.’

This program is active at Mercatus Center — mercatus.org/ideasofindia/1991-project

‘India's second freedom movement — The 1991 Project commemorates 30+ years of India's economic liberalization, promoting discourse on growth-centered economic reforms.’

Proceedings ••• of the 1st GOBLIN Workshop on Knowledge Graph Technologies, Leipzig, Germany — June 12, 2025, Edited by: Milan Dojchinovski and Blerina Spahiu

‘Knowledge Graphs are transforming the way we model, integrate, and analyze complex data, with applications spanning finance, health, robotics, and other domains, as well as in technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, and au- tomation. To advance this growing field, the 1st GOBLIN Workshop on Knowledge Graph Technologies was organized under the umbrella of the GOBLIN COST Action (https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA23147/). The Action aims to increase and enhance publicly available open knowledge in Europe and beyond by providing a large-scale, high- quality, cross-domain, and multilingual knowledge graph technology that is free to use, reuse, and redistribute.’

The Mises Institute in Sweden ••• (no English — translations by DeepL)

Rothbardiana ••• The austro-libertarian website on political philosophy and economics

Rothbard on the logic of action — https://www.rothbard.it/raccolte/the-logic-of-action.html — this links to a fascinating table of contents (then into the book)

The Cobden Centre ••• Our Vision

‘Our vision is of a peaceful, open and free society based on a stable, sustainable economy in which everyone has the opportunity to participate in constantly growing real prosperity.

“Father of Modern Sales: The Remarkable Mr. Patterson” by Gary Hoover, founder of The American Business History Center •••

According to the Kory Scale the curative power of a repurposed drug is directly related to the viciousness of the attacks against it. By that scale this article indicates that ivermectin is highly effective. — geneticliteracyproject.org/2022/12/13/simon-schuster-faces-criticism-for-publishing-book-claiming-discredited-ivermectin-stops-covid/

The War on Chlorine Dioxide ••• Dr. Pierre Kory with Jenna McCarthy

About fifteen pages of this book is devoted to the story of the disappearance of accounts of Mexico City’s successful use of ivermectin against Covid in December 2020.

‘The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS), one of the country’s governmental public health agencies, designed a program focused on early treatment, widely distributing kits containing ivermectin in the midst of this unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.’ The program was announced on December 29, 2020.

250 mobile testing units were deployed. Anyone tested was provided access to a doctor who could prescribe them a treatment kit containing ivermectin. They delivers 83,000 kits in the first month.

‘The Mexico City public health officials’ post-program analysis found massive reductions in hospitalization rates among ivermectin-treated patients.’

‘The Mexico City program study was performed by the head of the Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI), the Mexican Social Security Institute and the Mexico City Ministry of Health.’

‘Lead-authored by Jose Marino, the study’s conclusion determined that “a significant reduction in hospitalization was found among patients who received the ivermectin-based medical kit; …”

Papers describing the Mexico City program were removed from preprint servers.

If Dr. Kory were not reporting this in his new book it’s likely no one would ever know the story of the successful use of ivermectin in Mexico City.

The story is long and more complicated than the above. This is the essence. -ls

Pickax: “A New Platform for Human Voices (and Why I’m Joining It)”, by Pierre Kory: pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/reclaiming-the-digital-commons-no

‘A new creator platform is attempting something rare in today’s internet landscape: real human reach, real dialogue, and no invisible algorithm deciding who gets heard.’

“The Algorithmic Empire Is Crumbling and Pickax Is the Exodus” ••• by Jeff Dornik, creator of Pickax

“Pathologists Are Unaware of the Pathogen Causing Sudden Deaths from Covid Vaccines” ••• by Dr. Pierre Kory

From Bill Casey & Wend Peck on Katherine Austin Fitts & The Solari Report •••

Bill & Wendi run The Executive Leadership Group •••

“Freedom Worldwide with Tom G. Palmer: If Change Comes to Iran, Will Freedom Be Ready?” ••• [youtube] — was live on March 8, 2026

‘Iran’s political future remains uncertain. Economic strain, public dissent, and generational shifts have exposed deep fractures within the Islamic Republic. With U.S.–Iran tensions rising and both diplomacy and military pressure visible in the region, the stakes for Iran’s future have rarely felt more consequential.

Peace, Love, & Liberty ••• edited by Tom Palmer

‘The essays in this book offer evidence and arguments for peace. The writers advance peace not merely as a moral ideal or even a desirable goal, but as an eminently practical objective.’

The American Tribune •••

The Innocence Project •••

‘The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

‘It has come into focus now and you no longer need to be perplexed, mystified, bewildered, or bamboozled by events unspooling in Minneapolis and other hotspots of Woke-Marxist-Jacobin delirium. You are seeing the infernal machine of a sponsored revolution. Its parts are visible. They can be named and clearly understood. I will tell you how this works.’ -JHK

Global “Water Bankruptcy” is foreseen and now widely discussed

Michael Strong ••• [linkedin] on the need for community-based learning

‘Harvard CS50 is free online.

Comment by ls

Michael created and leads SocraticExperience.com

‘SocraticExperience.com, a secondary school for parents seeking a warm, motivating, high performance virtual educational experience for their children, specializing in creative, intellectual, and entrepreneurial students whose needs are not being met by conventional schools.’

“How Africa Imported Europe’s Worst Idea — What happens when you copy a declining continent's labor code”, by Magatte Wade, 26 Feb 2026

‘Senegal’s labor code is, on paper, one of the most protective in the world. If you want to fire someone, you need written notice, a formal hearing, severance scaled to how long they’ve worked for you, and if you get any of those steps wrong, a labor court can force you to take them back and pay damages on top.’

George Ayittey’s economics textbook ••• Applied Economics for Africa: A New Textbook for African Students

An improbable venture: a city proposed in the Sahara at Bir Tawil near the border of Egypt and Sudan, at approximately 21°52′14″ N, 33°44′14″ E, about 200 miles west of the Red Sea

‘In the Sahara desert lies one of the rarest places on Earth — Bir Tawil, a desert land claimed by no nation. This legal and political vacuum makes it the only truly stateless territory on the planet — a blank canvas for those who believe in peace, voluntary cooperation, and individual sovereignty.’ —wikipedia

Dr. Kathleen Ruddy ••• interviewed by Jan Jekielek ••• of Epoch Times •••

American Thought Leaders ••• interviews by Jan Jekielek

Cancer Care: The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer ••• by Dr. Paul E. Marik, MD, FCCM, FCCP

An Introduction to Paul Marik and his cancer research, in a few short videos •••

Dr. Paul E. Marik’s bio •••

“Marik's Miracle - How the Loss of One Career Fueled the Spectacular Rise of Another” ••• by Justus R. Hope, MD, 16 Jan 2024 in The Deseret Review

FLCCC: “The Moment for Honest Medicine Has Arrived” ••• 26 Jul 2024

Hedera (HBAR) & efficient financial mechanisms

Perceptive “big picture” accounts of the transition between traditional banking and finance to distributed ledger technology (DLT), decreasing costs and time required for complex transactions:

‘FedEx is no longer just delivering packages; they are officially running the hardware for the future of global logistics. By joining the Hedera Governing Council as a network node operator, the shipping giant is moving its entire lifecycle onto a public ledger. This seismic shift validates the Hashgraph as an industrial tool rather than a speculative asset. As corporations seek speed and predictable costs …’

“CME Group to Launch HBAR Index, Validating Hedera’s Institutional Status”

‘The CME [Chicago Mercantile Exchange] Group has announced that it will launch a regulated Reference Rate and Real-Time Index for Hedera’s native token, HBAR. This move, effective December 29, marks a significant milestone for Hedera, as it secures a place in the institutional financial ecosystem.’

“I didn’t expect CME to do this with HBAR…” ••• [youtube] Nick Regan

‘CME just put HBAR on institutional pricing rails and most holders missed why. This CME update sounds boring on the surface, but it sits at the intersection of retail psychology and institutional behavior, where markets quietly reprice assets long before headlines catch up.’

In freeorder terms, when a HashSphere ••• exposes part of itself to the Hedera Mainnet ••• it is engaging with an immense spontaneous order which is in a state of continual self-discovery and restructuring, much of which is mediated by prices and speculation. And, the many HashSpheres, each scrupulously private, contain much of the support for the designed orders that make up each venture using a HashSphere. Taken all together we can see that Hedera supports a freeordered financial system for the world. I'm not intending to suggest that Hedera will have any sort of monopoly, only that it has a contribution to make.

‘Your formulation—Hedera as a contributor to a freeordered global financial system, with HashSpheres housing the designed cores and the mainnet acting as the speculative, price-mediated environment they selectively open onto—is not just philosophically coherent; it is very close to how the product itself is pitched for regulated enterprises.

The architecture allows ventures and institutions to maintain the designed order they need for compliance, governance, and operational control within their private Spheres, while selectively engaging with the spontaneous order of the public mainnet for trust anchoring, interoperability, and market-discovered pricing. This creates a genuinely freeordered system where the balance between designed and spontaneous orders can be continuously adjusted according to what best supports each participant's subjectively rewarding adventure.’

The entire exchange with Perplexity ••• [a 2-page pdf]

Max Borders: “Broken People Shouldn't Try to Fix the World” ••• An

‘Max raises the provocative thesis of Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy—that a lot of contemporary therapeutic practice makes people worse by locking them into a victim identity organized around their wounds.’

Pat Wagner posted this comment:

‘The good news is that, out of the fifty-plus theories of how humans learn and communicate, there are at least several that focus on the "how" and not the "why."

They help people move from the past into the present, where they can take actions to achieve future goals. I hang out with cognitive-behavioral and behavioral professionals, whose mantra is "We can't do anything about the past."

Sophia Miller — YouTube Channel — https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sophia+miller

A highly untrustworthy, almost certainly ai generated, YouTube channel that is nonetheless quite interesting and presents logical analysis of things that might be true but usually are only partially true. Look for “Sophia Miller” and extravagant titles about various governors and mayors who are destroying their cities.

Videos appear and are usually become inaccessible within a few days. This is probably due to actions taken by the producers of the videos, not by YouTube.

A Question to Ask Before a Financial Crisis:: Do you own your investments?

In a financial crisis will it be possible for some entity to pay its debts by liquidating a portfolio of equities you (and possibly your broker or advisor) believe you own?

A Plan to Solve the World’s Problems —the Swift PAC

Ban all payments rewarding the sale or use of anything not explicitly authorized by government. Assume every citizen is a potential criminal who would like to violate this law or collaborate with someone who is doing so. Jobs lost in sales and promotion would be offset by an enormous growth in regulatory, intelligence, and enforcement services. Revenues to fund the program would be readily available once the population became informed about awful things that have been done by sales people, and harm done by use of things not properly unauthorized. Fear of being exploited by unscrupulous people and programs would make everyone willing to bear the increased taxes required to support suppression, and also, very helpfully, would make good citizens ready to report, condemn, silence, fire, and isolate doubters and objectors.

In case this might be a bad idea, at first it could be limited to matters of public health. —the Swift PAC

More Áza Valon? Who is she? Should we care?

The whole idea of Áza Valon’s campaigns for liberty is to slowly (increasingly rapidly) deprive managers of forcibly maintained excess design of resources required for its continuation, and to inspire investment of liberated resources into ventures supporting the regeneration of everything that has been damaged

I got tired of references to this person, that never told us much about her, so I asked Perplexity.ai who she is. Here’s a brief report ••• with 30 citations.